their songs in a
whisper and pray in a whisper. That was a prayer-meeting from house to
house once or twice--once or twice a week.

"Old Phipps whipped me once. He aimed to kill me but I got loose. He
whipped me about a colored girl of his'n that he had by a colored woman.
Phipps went with a colored woman before he married his wife. He had a
girl named Martha Ann Phipps. I beat Martha 'bout a pair of stockings.
My mistress bought me a nice pair of stockings from the store. You see,
they used to knit the stockings. I wore the stockings once; then I
washed them and put them on the fence to dry. Martha stole them and put
them on. I beat her and took them off of her. She ran and told her
father and he ran me home. He couldn't catch me, and he told me he'd get
me. I didn't run to my father. I run to my mistress, and he knew he'd
better not do nothin' then. He said, 'I'll get you, you little old black
some thin'.' Only he didn't say 'somethin'.' He didn't get me then.

"But one day he caught me out by his house. I had gone over that way on
an errand I needn't have done. He had two girls hold me. They was
Angeline and Nancy. They didn't much want to hold me anyhow. Some
niggers would catch you and kill you for the white folks and then there
was some that wouldn't. I got loose from them. He tried to hold me
hisself but he couldn't. I got away and went back to my old mistress and
she wrote him a note never to lay his dirty hands on me again. A little
later her brother, Johnson Chatman, came there and ran him off the
place. My old mistress' name was Susan Chatman before she married. Then
she married Toliver. Then she married Reed. She married Reed last--after
Toliver died.

"One old lady named Emily Moorehead runned in and held my mother once
for Phipps to whip her. And my mother was down with consumption too. I
aimed to git old Phipps for that. But then I got religion and I couldn't
do it. Religion makes you forgit a heap of things.

"Susan Reed, my old mistress, bought my father and paid fifteen hundred
dollars for him and she hadn't never seen 'im. Advertising. He had run
away so much that they had to advertise and sell 'im. He never would run
away from Miss Susan. She was good to him till she got that old nigger
beater Phipps. Her husband, Reed, was called a nigger spoiler. My father
was an old man when Phipps was on overseer and wasn't able to fight much
then.

"Phipps sure was a bad man. He wasn't so bad neither; but